Predicting pollution

(University of Delaware)

9:57 a.m., Aug. 22, 2014–Considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, April 2010’s Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico challenged scientists to think about the way in which oil and other pollutants move in the ocean.

Scientists in the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment (CEOE), in partnership with other researchers, conducted the largest deployment of ocean drifting instruments to date and found that small-scale ocean currents play a major role in the spread of pollutants at the ocean surface.
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Their findings will help better predict the path of pollutants from future oil spills or nuclear disasters. They provide new information about significant dispersion patterns currently un-accounted for in ocean models.